Live camera
Kilauea, Halemaumau Crater live camera — Hawaii Island
Kilauea has been erupting since December 2024. Lava fountains every few days to few weeks, and a smouldering crater in between. A Hawaiian Volcano Observatory camera. It watches Halemaumau from the northwest caldera rim, and staff change the aim and zoom as activity shifts.
Sample December 2025What you are looking at
Looking down into Halemaumau, the crater inside Kilauea's summit caldera, from the rim. The camera belongs to the US Geological Survey's volcano observatory and is there to keep watch.
Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, and each eruption leaves the crater floor different. When a lava lake forms, the floor glows red; when activity stops, it goes back to black rock. The 2018 eruption collapsed the crater and made it far deeper, and for a while afterwards water pooled at the bottom. The same view shows genuinely different things from one year to the next.
Red lava reads best in the dark, so this camera is at its most interesting at night. Hawaii runs 19 hours behind Japan, which puts a Japanese evening in the small hours of the Hawaiian morning.
The 2018 collapse put the observatory's own building, on the caldera rim, out of use, and the staff moved into the town of Hilo. What stayed behind to keep watching is the camera. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory was founded in 1912, making it one of the oldest in the world, and the monitoring methods worked out here are used by volcano observatories elsewhere. The crater's name, Halemaumau, marks it in Hawaiian tradition as the home of Pele, the goddess of fire.
Volcanic gas can haze over the whole frame, and how much plume there is depends on the day's activity.
About this camera
| Place | Hawaii Island |
| Format | Live video |
| Time zone | Pacific/Honolulu (UTC-10) |
| Category | Volcano |
| Operator | U.S. Geological Survey |
| Terms of use | U.S. government work |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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